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The ogic of Penal SubstitutionByJ. I. PACKER
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(The spelling is English, not USA version.)
The task which I have set myself in this lecture is to focus and ex-
plicate a belief which, by and large, is a distinguishing mark of the
word-wide evangelical fraternity: namely, the belief that the cross
had the character of penal substitution,and that it was in virtue of
this fact that it brought salvation to mankind. Two considerations
prompt my attempt. First, the significance of penal substitution is
not always stated as exactly as is desirable, so that the idea often
gets misunderstood and caricatured by its critics; and I should
like, if I can, to make such misunderstanding more difficult.
Second, I am one of those who believe that this notion takes us to
the very heart of the Christian gospel, and I welcome the oppor-
tunity of commending my conviction by analysis and argument.
My plan is this: first, to clear up some questions of method, so
that there will be no doubt as to what I am doing; to explore what
it means to call Christs death substitutionary; third, to see what
further meaning is added when Christs substitutionary suffering
is calledpenal; fourth, to note in closing that the analysis offered isnot out of harmony with learned exegetical opinion. These are, I
believe, needful preliminaries to any serious theological estimate
of this view.
I. MYSTERY AND MODEL
Every theological question has behind it a history of study, and
narrow eccentricity in handling it is unavoidable unless the histo-
ry is taken into account. Adverse comment on the concept of penal
substitution often betrays narrow eccentricity or this kind. Thetwo main historical points relating to this idea are, first, that Luth-
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er, Calvin, Zwingli, Melanchthon and their reforming contempo-raries were the pioneers in stating it and, second, that the argu-
ments brought against it in 1578 by the Unitarian Pelagian, Faus-
tus Socinus, in his brilliant polemic De Jesu Christo Servatore (Of
Jesus Christ the Saviour)1have been central in discussion of it ever
since. What the Reformers did was to redefine satisfactio (satisfac-
tion), the main mediaeval category for thought about the cross.
Anselms Cur Deus Homo?, which largely determined the me-
diaeval development, saw Christs satisfactio for our sins as the
offering of compensation or damages for dishonour done, but the
Reformers saw it as the undergoing of vicarious punishment (poe-
na)to meet the claims on us of Gods holy law and wrath ( i.e. his
punitive justice). What Socinus did was to arraign this idea as irra-
tional, incoherent, immoral and impossible. Giving pardon, he
argued, does not square with taking satisfaction, nor does the
transferring of punishment from the guilty to the innocent square
with justice; nor is the temporary death of one a true substitute for
the eternal death of many; and a perfect substitutionary satisfac-
tion, could such a thing be, would necessarily confer on us unli-
mited permission to continua in sin. Socinus alternative account
of New Testament soteriology, based on the axiom that God for-
gives without requiring any satisfaction save the repentance
which makes us forgivable, was evasive and unconvincing, and
had little influence. But his classic critique proved momentous: it
held the attention of all exponents of the Reformation view for
1Socinus arguments were incorporated in the Racovian Catechism,published at
Racow (the modern Cracow) in 1605, which set forth the Unitarianism of thePolish Brethren. After several revisions of detail down to 1680 the text was fina-
lized and in due course translated into English by Thomas Rees (London, 1818). It
is a document of classical importance in Unitarian history.
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more than a century, and created a tradition of rationalistic preju-dice against that view which has effectively shaped debate about
it right down to our own day.
The almost mesmeric effect of Socinus critique on Reformed
scholastics in particular was on the whole unhappy. It forced them
to develop rational strength in stating and connecting up the vari-
ous parts of their position, which was good, but it also led them to
fight back on the challengers own ground, using the Socinian
technique of arguing apriori about God as if he were a man to
be precise, a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century monarch, head of
both the legislature and the judiciary in his own realm but bound
nonetheless to respect existing law and judicial practice at every
point. So the God of Calvary came to he presented in a whole se-
ries of expositions right down to that of Louis Berkhof (1938) as
successfully avoiding all the moral and legal lapses which Socinus
claimed to find in the Reformation view.2 But these demonstra-
tions, however skilfully done (and demonstrators like Francis Tur-
retin and Hodge, to name but two,3 were very skilful indeed), had
built in weaknesses. Their stance was defensive rather than decla-
ratory, analytical and apologetic rather than doxological and ke-
rygmatic. They made the word of the cross sound more like a
conundrum than a confession of faith more like a puzzle, we
2See L. Berkhof, Systematic Theology 4, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, and Banner of
Truths, London (1949) 373-383. Berkhofs zeal to show that God did nothing illeg-
al or unjust makes a strange impression on the post-Watergate reader.3See F. Turretin, Institutio Theologiae Elenchticae Geneva (1682), II. xiv, De Offi-
cio Christi Mediatoris, and A. A. Hodge, The Atonement, Nelson, London (1868).
Turretins position is usefully summarized in L. W. Grensted, A Short History of theDoctrine of the Atonement, Manchester University Press (1 920) 241-252.Cf.J. F. Hei-
deggers parallel account in his Corpus Theologiae Christianae,Zurich (1700), which R.
S. Franks reviews in The Work of Christ, Nelson, London (1962) 426ff.
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might say, than a gospel. What was happening? Just this: that intrying to beat Socinian rationalism at its own game, Reformed
theologians were conceding the Socinian assumption that every
aspect of Gods work of reconciliation will be exhaustively explic-
able in terms of a natural theology of divine government, drawn
from the world of contemporary legal and political thought. Thus,
in their zeal to show themselves rational, they became rationalis-
tic.4Here as elsewhere, methodological rationalism became in the
seventeenth century a worm in the Reformed bud, leading in the
next two centuries to a large-scale withering of its theological
flower.
Now I do not query the substantial rightness of the Reformed
view of the atonement; on the contrary, I hope to confirm it, as
will appear; but I think it is vital that we should unambiguously
4In his influential book Christus Victor,tr. A. G. Hebert, SPCK, London (1931),
which advocated a dramatic, non-rational way of declaring Gods conquest of evi l
through the cross, Gustaf Auln describes the Latin account of the atonement (i.e.
that of Anselm and Protestant orthodoxy) as juridical in its inmost essence (p.
106), and says: It concentrates its effort upon a rational attempt to explain how the
Divine Love and the Divine Justice can be reconciled. The Love of God is regu-
lated by His Justice, and is only free to act within the limits that Justice marks out.
Ratio and Lex,rationality and justice, go hand in hand. . . The attempt is made by
the scholastics to elaborate a theology which shall provide a comprehensive expla-
nation of the Divine government of the world, which shall answer all questions and
solve all riddles. . . . (pp. 173f.) What Auln fails to note is how much of this impl i-
citly rationalistic cast of thought was a direct reaction to Socinus rationalistic criti-
que. In fact, Auln does not mention Socinus at all; nor does he refer to Calvin,
who asserts penal substitution as strongly as any, but follows an exegetical and
Christocentric method which is not in the least scholastic or rationalistic. Calvin
shows no interest in the reconciling of Gods love and justice as a theoretical prob-
lem; his only interest is in the mysterious but blessed fact that at the cross God didact in both love and justice to save us from our sins. Cf. P. van Buren, Christ in our
Place: the substitutionary character of Calvins doctrine of Reconciliation, Oliver and Boyd,
Edinburgh (1957).
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renounce any such intellectual method as that which I have de-scribed, and look for a better one. I shall now try to commend
what seems to me a sounder method by offering answers to two
questions: (1) What sort of knowledge of Christs achievement on
the cross is open to us? (2) From what source and by what means
do we gain it?
(1) What sort of knowledge of Gods action in Christs death
may we have? That a man named Jesus was crucified under Pon-
tius Pilate about AD 30 is common historical knowledge, but
Christian beliefs about his divine identity and the significance of
his dying cannot be deduced from that fact alone. What further
sort of knowledge about the cross, then, may Christians enjoy?
The answer, we may say, is faith-knowledge:by faith we know
that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Yes, in-
deed; but what sort of knowledge is faith-knowledge? It is a kind
of knowledge of which God is both giver and content. It is a Spi-
rit-given acquaintance with divine realities, given through ac-
quaintance with Gods word. It is a kind of knowledge whichmakes the knower say in one and the same breath both whereas I
was blind, now I see (Jn 9:25) and also now we see as in a mirror,
darkly . . . now I know in part (1 Cor. 13:12). For it is a unique
kind of knowledge which, though real, is not full; it is knowledge
of what is discernible within a circle of light against the back-
ground of a larger darkness; it is, in short, knowledge of a mystery,
the mystery of the living God at work.
Mystery is used here as it was by Charles Wesley when he
wrote:
Tis mystery all! The immortal dies!
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Who can explore his strange design?In vain the first-born seraph tries
To sound the depths of love divine!
Mystery in the sense (traditional in theology) means a reality
distinct from us which in our very apprehending of it remains un-
fathomable to us: a reality which we acknowledge as actual with-
out knowing how it is possible, and which we therefore describe
as incomprehensible, Christian metaphysicians, moved by wonder
at the world, speak of the created order as imagery, meaning that
there is more to it, and more of God in it, than they can grasp; and
similarly Christian theologians, taught by revelation, apply the
same word, for parallel reasons to the self-revealed and self-
revealing God, and to his work of reconciliation and redemption
through Christ. It will be seen that this definition of mystery cor-
responds less to Pauls use of the word mustarion (which be ap-
plied to the open secret of Gods saving purpose, set forth in the
gospel) than to his prayer that the Ephesians might know the love
of Christ which passes knowledge (Eph. 3:19). Knowing through di-
vine enlightenment that which passes knowledge is precisely
what it means to be acquainted with the mystery of God. The re-
vealed mystery (in Pauls sense) of Christ confronts us with the
unfathomable mystery (in the sense I defined) of the Creator
who exceeds the comprehension of his creatures. Accordingly,
Paul ends his full-dress, richest-ever exposition of the mystery of
Christ by crying: O depth of wealth, wisdom, and knowledge in
God! How unsearchable his judgments, how untraceable his
ways! Who knows the mind of the Lord?. . . Source, Guide and
Goal of all that is to him to be glory for ever ! Amen (Rom.
11:33ff., NEB). Here Paul shows, and shares, his awareness that
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the God of Jesus remains the God of Job, and that the highest wis-dom of the theological theorist, even when working under divine
inspiration as Paul did, is to recognise that he is, as it were, gazing
into the sun, whose very brightness makes it impossible for him
fully to see it; so that at the end of the day he has to admit that
God has much more to him than theories can ever contain, and to
humble himself in adoration before the one whom he can never
fully analyse.
Now the atonement is a mystery in the defined sense, one as-
pect of the total mystery of God. But it does not stand alone in
this. Every aspect of Gods reality and work, without exception, is
mystery. The eternal Trinity; Gods sovereignty in creation, provi-
dence, and grace; the incarnation, exaltation, present reign and
approaching return of Jesus Christ; the inspiring of the Holy
Scriptures; and the ministry of the Spirit in the Christian and the
Church each of these (to look no further) is a reality beyond our
full fathoming, just as the cross is. And theories about any of these
things which used human analogies to dispel the dimension of
mystery would deserve our distrust, just as rationalistic theories
about the cross do.
It must be stressed that the mystery is in each case the reality
itself, as distinct from anything in our apprehension of it, and as
distinct therefore from our theories, problems, affirmations and
denials about it. What makes it a mystery is that creatures like
ourselves can comprehend it only in part. To say this does not
open the door to scepticism, for our knowledge of divine realities
(like our knowledge of each other) is genuine knowledge ex-pressed in notions which, so far as they go, are true. But it does
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close the door against rationalism, in the sense of theorizing thatclaims to explain with finality any aspect of Gods way of existing
and working. And with that, it alerts us to the fact that the pres-
ence in our theology of unsolved problems is not necessarily a ref-
lection on the truth or adequacy of our thoughts. Inadequate and
untrue theories do of course exist: a theory (the word comes from
theorein,to look at) is a view or sight of something, and if ones
way of looking at it is perverse ones view will be distorted, and
distorted views are always full of problems. But the mere presence
of problems is not enough to prove a view distorted; true views in
theology also entail unsolved problems, while any view that was
problem-free would certainly be rationalistic and reductionist.
True theories in theology, whether about the atonement or any-
thing else, will suspect themselves of being inadequate to their
object throughout. One thing that Christians know by faith is that
they know only in part.
None of this, of course, is new or unfamiliar; it all belongs to
the main historic stream of Christian thought. But I state it here,
perhaps too laboriously, because it has not always been brought to
bear rigorously enough on the doctrine of the atonement. Also,
this position has linguistic implications which touch the doctrine
of the atonement in ways which are not always fully grasped; and
my next task is to show what these are.
Human knowledge and thoughts are expressed in words, and
what we must note now is that all attempts to speak of the mys-
tery of the unique and transcendent God involve many kinds; of
stretching of ordinary language. We say, for instance that God isboth plural and singular, being three in one; that he directs and
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determines the free acts of men; that he is wise, good and sove-reign, when he allows Christians to starve or die of cancer; that
the divine Son has always upheld the universe, even when he was
human baby; and so forth. At first sight, such statements might
appear nonsensical (either meaningless or false). But Christians
say that, though they would be nonsensical if made of men, they
are true as statements about God. If so, however, it is clear that the
key words are not being used in an everyday way. Whatever our
views on the origins of human language and the inspiration of the
Scriptures (both matters on which it seems that options are cur-
rently being broadened rather than reduced), there can be no dis-
pute that the meaning of all the nouns, adjectives and verbs that
we use for stating facts and giving descriptions is anchored, at
least in the first instance, in our experience of knowing things and
people (ourselves included) in this world. Ordinary language is
thus being adapted for an extraordinary purpose when we use it
to speak of God. Christians have always made this adaptation eas-
ily in their prayers, praises and proclamations, as if it were a natu-
ral thing to do (as indeed I think it is), and the doubts articulated
by living if somewhat old-fashioned philosophers like A. J. Ayer
and Antony Flew as to whether such utterance expresses know-
ledge and conveys information about anything more than private
attitudes seem curiously provincial as well as paradoxical.5 More-
5Ayer voiced his doubts in Language, Truth and Logic,Gollancz, London (1936,
2nd ed. 1946), Flew his in Theology and Falsification, New Essays in Philosophical
Theology,ed. A. G. N. Flew and Alasdair Maclntyre, SCM, London (1955) 96-130.
There are replies in, among other books, E. L. Mascall, Words and Images, Long-
mans, London (1957); Faith and Logic, ed. Basil Mitchell, Allen and Unwin, London(1957); Frederick Ferr, Language, Logic and God, Eyre and Spottiswoode, London
(1962; Fontana ed. 1970); W. Hordern, Speaking of God, Macmillan, New York
(1964).
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over, it is noticeable that the common Christian verbal forms forexpressing divine mysteries have from the first shown remarkable
consistency and steadiness in maintaining their builtin logical
strangeness, as if the apprehended reality of God was itself sus-
taining them (as indeed I think it was). Language about the cross
illustrates this clearly: liturgies, hymns and literature, homiletical,
catechetical and apologetic, all show that Christians have from the
start lived by faith in Christs death as a sacrifice made to God in
reparation for their sins, however uncouth and mythological such
talk sounds (and must always have sounded), however varied the
presentations of atonement which teachers tried out, and however
little actual theologizing about the cross went on in particular pe-
riods, especially the early centuries.6
Christian language, with its peculiarities, has been much stu-
died during the past twenty years, and two things about it have
become clear, First, all its odd, stretched, contradictory and inco-
herent-sounding features derive directly from the unique Chris-
tian notion of the transcendent, tripersonal Creator-God. Chris-
tians regard God as free from the limits that bind creatures like
ourselves, who bear Gods image while not existing on his level,
6Of the church in the patristic period H. B. W. Turner writes: Its experience of
Redemption through Christ was far richer than its attempted formulations of this
experience (The Patristic Doctrine of Redemption, Mowbray, London (1952) 13;
cf. chapter V, Christ our Victim). On T. F. Torrances sharp-edged thesis in The
Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers, Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh (1948)
that the Apostolic Fathers lapsed from New Testament faith in the cross to a legal-
ism of self-salvation, Robert S. Pauls comment in The Atonement and the Sacra-
ments, Hodder and Stoughton, London (1961), 37, note 2, is just: To me he hasmade his case almost too well, for at the end I am left asking the question, In what
sense, then, could the Church change this much and still be the Church? In fact,
Torrances thesis needs the qualification of Turners statement quoted above.
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and Christian language, following biblical precedent, shakes freefrom ordinary limits in a way that reflects this fact. So, for in-
stance, faced with Johns declaration in 1 John 4:8-10, God is
love. . . . Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved
us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins, Calvin can
write without hesitation: The word propitiation (placatio; Greek,
hilasmos) has great weight: for God, in a way that cannot be put
into words (ineffabili quodam modo),at the very time when he loved
us, was hostile (infensus) to us till he was reconciled in Christ.7
Calvins phrase in away that cannot be put into words is his ac-
knowledgement that the mystery of God is beyond our grasp. To
Calvin, this duality of attitude, love and hostility, which in human
psychological terms is inconceivable, is part of Gods moral glory;
a sentiment which might make rationalistic theologians shake
their heads, but at which John certainly would have nodded his.
Second, Christian speech verbalizes the apprehended mystery
of God by using a distinctive non-representational picture-
language. This consists of parables, analogies, metaphors and im-
ages piled up in balance with each other, as in the Bible itself
(from which this language is first learned), and all pointing to the
reality of Gods presence and action in order to evoke awareness
of it and response to it. Analysis of the functioning of this lan-
guage is currently in full swing,8 and no doubt much remains to
be said. Already, however, the discussion has produced one firm
7Inst.II. xvii. 2. This thought is picked up in Anglican Article II: Christ . . . tr u-
ly suffered . . . to reconcile his Father to us, and to be a sacrifice, not only for origi-
nal guilt, but also for all actual sins of men. On propitiation, cf. note 21 below. 8 For surveys of the present state of play, Ferrs Language, Logic God; Ian C.
Barbour,Myths, Models and Paradigms, SCM, London (1974); John Macquarrie, God-
Talk,SCM, London (1967).
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result of major importance the recognition that the verbal unitsof Christian speech are models, comparable to the thought-
models of modern physics.9The significance of this appears from
John MacIntyres judgment that the theory of models succeeds in
reinstating the doctrine of analogy in modern theological logic . . .
and that analogy is to be interpreted in terms of a theory of mod-
els and not vice versa.10 The doctrine of analogy is the time-
harboured account, going back to Aquinas, of how ordinary lan-
guage is used to speak intelligibly of a God who is partly like us
(because we bear his image) and partly unlike us (because he is
the infinite Creator while we are finite creatures).11All theological
models, like the non-descriptive models of the physical sciences,
have an analogical character; they are, we might say, analogies
with a purpose, thought-patterns which function in a particular
way, teaching us to focus one area of reality (relationships with
God) by conceiving of it in terms of another, better known area of
reality (relationships with each other). Thus they actually inform
us about our relationship with God and through the Holy Spirit
9The pioneer in stating this was Ian T. Ramsey: see his Religious Language,SCM,
London (1957); Models and Mystery, Oxford University Press London (1964);Chris-
tian Discourse, Oxford University Press, London (1965). For further discussion of
models in theology cf. John Maclntyre, The Shape of Christology, SCM, London
(1966), especially 54-81; Thomas Fawcett, The Symbolic Language of Religion, SCM,
London (1970) 69-94; Barbour,op. cit.10The Shape of Christology, 63.11 The idea of analogy is formulated by the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian
Church, s.v., as follows: A method of predication whereby concepts derived from a
familiar object are made applicable to a relatively unknown object in virtue of somesimilarity between the two otherwise dissimilar objects. Aquinas account of analo-
gy is inSumma Theologica I. xiii and can be read in Words about God, ed. Ian T. Ram-
sey, SCM, London (1971) 36ff.
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enable us to unify, clarify and intensify our experience in that rela-tionship.
The last song in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
assures us that any dream will do to wake the weary into joy.
Will any model do to give knowledge of the living God? Histori-
cally, Christians have not thought so. Their characteristic theologi-
cal method, whether practised clumsily or skilfully, consistently
or inconsistently, has been to take biblical models as their God-
given starting-point, to base their belief-system on what biblical
writers use these models to say, and to let these models operate as
controls, both suggesting and delimiting what further, secondary
models may be developed in order to explicate these which are
primary. As models in physics are hypotheses formed under the
suggestive control of empirical evidence to correlate and predict
phenomena, so Christian theological models are explanatory con-
structs formed to help us know, understand and deal with God,
the ultimate reality. From this standpoint, the whole study of
Christian theology, biblical, historical and systematic, is the ex-
ploring of a three-tier hierarchy of models: first, the control mod-
els given in Scripture (God, Son of God, kingdom of God, word of
God, love of God, glory of God, body of Christ, justification, adop-
tion, redemption, new birth and so forth in short, all the con-
cepts analysed in Kittels great Wrterbuch and its many epigoni)
next, dogmatic models which the church crystallized out to define
and defend the faith (homoousion, Trinity, nature, hypostatic un-
ion, double procession, sacrament, supernatural, etc. in short,
all the concepts usually dealt with in doctrinal textbooks); finally,
interpretive models lying between Scripture and defined dogma
which particular theologians and theological schools developed
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for stating the faith to contemporaries (penal substitution, verbalinspiration, divinization, Barths Nihil das Nichtige and
many more).
It is helpful to think of theology in these terms, and of the
atonement in particular. Socinus went wrong in this matter first
by identifying the biblical model of Gods kingship with his own
sixteenth-century monarchy model (a mistake later repeated by
Hugo Grotius), second by treating this not-wholly-biblical model
as his control, and third by failing to acknowledge that the mys-
tery of God is more than any one model, even the best, can ex-
press. We have already noticed that some orthodox writers ans-
wering Socinus tended to slip in a similar way. The passion to
pack God into a conceptual box of our own making is always
strong, but must be resisted. If we bear in mind that all the know-
ledge we can have of the atonement is of a mystery about which
we can only think and speak by means of models, and which re-
main a mystery when all is said and done, it will keep us from ra-
tionalistic pitfalls and thus help our progress considerably.
II. BIBLE AND MODEL
(2) Now we come up to our second question, my answer to which
has been hinted at already. By what means is knowledge of the
mystery of the cross given us? I reply: through the didactic
thought-models given in the Bible, which in truth are instruction,
from God. In other words, I proceed on the basis of the main-
stream Christian belief in biblical inspiration, which I have sought
to justify elsewhere.12
12For Thomists, the doctrine of analogy serves to explain how knowledge of
creatures gives knowledge of their Creator (natural theology) as well as how biblical
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What this belief means, in formula terms, is that the HolyScriptures of both Testaments have the dual character which the
viva voce teaching of prophets, apostles and supremely Jesus had:
in content, if not in grammatical form, it is both human witness to
God and Gods witness to himself. The true analogy for inspira-
tion is incarnation, the personal Word of God becoming flesh. As a
multiple confession of faith in the God who rules, judges and
saves in the space-time continuum which we call world history,
the Bible consists of occasional documents, historical didactic and
liturgical, all proclaiming in various ways what God has done, is
doing and will do. Each document and each utterance within that
document, like Jesus Christ and each of his utterances, is anchored
in a particular historical situation this particularity marks all
the Christian revelation and to discern within these particulari-
ties truths from God for universal application is the interpreters
major task. His guideline is the knowledge that Gods word for
today is found through understanding and reapplying the word
that God spoke long ago in identity (substantial, not grammatical)
with the message of the biblical authors. The way into Gods mind
remains via their minds, for their assertions about God embody in
particularized form what he wants to tell us today about himself.
In other words, God says in application to us the same things that
he originally said in application to those to whom the biblical
books were first addressed. The details of the second application
differ from the first in a way that corresponds to the difference
between our situation and that of the first addresses, but the
imagery gives knowledge of the God of both nature and grace (scriptural theology).
For a technical Thomist discussion, concentrating on analogy in natural theology,
see E. L. Mascall,Existence and Analogy, Longmans, London (1949) 92-121.
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truths of principle being applied are the same. Divine speech isitself, of course, a model, but it is a controlling one. It signifies the
reality of mind-to-mind instruction from God to us by verbal
means, and thus teaches us to categorize all other didactic models
found in Scripture, not as hypothesis or hunch, but as revelation.
How do these revealed models become means of Gods in-
struction? Here, it must regretfully be said, Ian Ramsey, the pio-
neer exponent of the model-structure of biblical thinking, fails us.
He describes vividly how these models trigger off religious disclo-
sures and so evoke religious responses, but instead of equating the
beliefs they express with divine teaching he leaves quite open, and
therefore quite obscure, the relation between the disclosures as
intuitions of reality and the thoughts which the models convey.
This means that he lacks criteria for distinguishing true from false
intuitions. Sometimes he speaks as if all feelings of cosmic disclo-
sure convey insights that are true and self-authenticating, but one
need only mention the Buddha, Mohammed, Mrs. Mary Baker
Eddy, the fake prophets exposed by Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Mi-
caiah in 1 Kings 22, and the visionaries of Colossians 2:18f., to
show that this is not so. Also Ramsey seems to be without criteria
for relating models to each other and developing from them a co-
herent belief-system, and he nowhere considers what the divine-
speech model implies.13
13For Ramseys overall view of models, see the works cited in note 9. On most
theological subjects his opinions, so far as he reveals them, are unexceptionably
middle-of-the-road, but it is noteworthy that in his lecture on Atonement Theol o-
gy in Christian Discourse (pp. 28ff.) he hails Hastings Rashdalls Abelardian treatiseThe Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919) as definitive (p. 29; no reasons giv-
en); limits the cosmic disclosure evoked by the cross to a sense of the victorious
will of God, whose plan to maintain a remnant did not fail (pp. 32, 34), and whose
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Must our understanding of how biblical models function beas limited or as loose as Ramseys is? Not necessarily. Recognition
that the biblical witness to God has the logic of models not iso-
lated, incidentally, but linked together, and qualifying each other
in sizeable units of meaning is compatible with all the views
taken in the modern hermeneutical debate. Central to this debate
are two questions. The first is whether the reference-point and
subject-matter of biblical witness is just the transformed psyche,
the new being as such, or whether it does not also, and indeed
primarily, refer to saving acts of God and a living divine Saviour
that were originally there as datable realities in the space-time
continuum of world history, and that owe their transforming
power here in Christian lives now to the fact that they were
there on the stage of history then. To the extent that the former
alternative is embraced, one has to say that the only factual infor-
mation which the biblical writers communicate is that Gods
love this victory shows (pp. 59f.); rejects the grounding of justification on substitu-
tion or satisfaction as involving frontier-clashes with the language of morals (p.
40; the old Socinian objection); and criticizes the exegeting of justification, substitu-
tion, satisfaction, reconciliation, redemption, propitiation and expiation as if these
words were not models at all, but described procedural transactions each describing a
species of atonement engineering (p. 44). Profound confusion appears here. Ce r-
tainly these words arc models, but what they are models of is precisely procedural
transactions for achieving atonement, transactions in which the Father and the Son
dealt with each other on our behalf. The contents apostolic argument in which
these models appear make this unambiguously plain, and to assume, as Ramsey
seems to do, that as models they can only have a directly subjective reference to
what Bultmann would call a new self-understanding is quite arbitrary. Indeed, Ram-
sey himself goes on to show that the model-category for biblical concepts does not
require an exclusively subjective reference, for he dwells on love as a model ofGods activity (p. 59) and If love can be such a model, why not these other words?
It seems evident that Ramsey brought Abelardian-Socinian assumptions to his
study of the biblical words, rather than deriving his views from that study.
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people felt and thought in certain ways at certain times in Certainsituations. Then one has to face the question whether the writers
thought this was all the factual information they were communi-
cating; if one says no, then one has to justify ones disagreement
with them; if one says yes, one has to explain why so much of
their witness to Christ has the form of factual narration about him
why, indeed, the gospel as a literary form was ever invented.
If, however, one takes the latter alternative, as all sober reason
seems to counsel, then the second central question arises: how
much distortion of fact is there in the narrating, and how much of
guesswork, hunch, and fantasy is there in the interpreting of the
historical realities that were there? I cannot discuss these massive
and complex issues here; suffice it to declare, in relation to this
debate, that I am proceeding on the basis that the biblical writers
do indeed give true information about certain historical events,
public and in principle datable, which have resulted in a Saviour
and a salvation being there for sinners to receive by faith; and
that the biblical thought-models in terms of which these events are
presented and explained are revealed models, ways of thought that
God himself has taught us for the true understanding of what he
has done for us and will do in us.
Also, I proceed on the basis that the Holy Spirit who inspired
prophetic and apostolic testimony in its written as well as its oral
form is now active to teach Christians through it, making them
aware of its divine quality overall, its message to themselves, and
the presence and potency of God in Christ to whom it points.
Since the Spirit has been teaching the church in this way in every
age, much of our listening to the Bible in the present will rightly
take the form of reviewing theological constructions of the past,
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testing them by the written word from which they took their rise.When a particular theological view, professedly Bible-based, has
over the centuries proved a mainspring of Christian devotion,
faith and love, one approaches it, not indeed uncritically, but with
respect, anticipating the discovery that it is substantially right.
Our present task is to elucidate and evaluate one historic line of
biblical interpretation which has had an incalculable impact on
countless lives since it was clarified in the century of the Reforma-
tion; it will be strange if it proves to have been entirely wrong.14
So much, then, for methodological preliminaries, which have
been tedious but necessary; now to our theme directly.
III. SUBSTITUTION
The first thing to say about penal substitution has been said al-
ready. It is a Christian theological model, based on biblical exege-
sis, formed to focus a particular awareness of what Jesus did at
Calvary to bring us to God. If we wish to speak of the doctrine of
penal substitution, we should remember that this model is a dra-
matic, kerygmatic picturing of divine action, much more like
Aulns classic idea of divine victory (though Auln never saw
this) than it is like the defensive formula-models which we call the
Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian doctrine of
the person of Christ. Logically, the model is put together in two
stages: first, the death of Christ is declared to have been substitu-
14Cf. Vincent Taylors remark, in The Atonement in New Testament Teaching, Ep-
worth Press, London (1940) 301f.: The thought of substitution is one we have per-haps been more anxious to reject than to assess; yet the immeasurable sense of
gratitude with which it is associated . . . is too great a thing to be wanting in a wor-
thy theory of the Atonement.
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tionary; thenthe substitution is characterized, and given a specificframe of reference by adding the wordpenal.We shall examine the
two stages separately.
Stage one is to declare Christs death substitutionary. What
does this mean? The Oxford English Dictionary defines substitution
as the putting of one person orthing in the place of another. One
oddity of contemporary Christian talk is that many who affirm
that Jesus death was vicarious and representative deny that it was
substitutionary; for the Dictionary defines both words in substitu-
tionary terms! Representation is said to mean the fact of standing
for, or in place of, some other thing or person, esp. with a right or
authority to act on their account; substitution of one thing or per-
son for another. And vicarious is defined as that takes or sup-
plies the place of another thing or person; substituted instead of the
proper thing or person. So here, it seems, is a distinction without
a difference. Substitution is, in fact, a broad idea that applies
whenever one person acts to supply anothers need, or to dis-
charge his obligation, so that the other no longer has to carry the
load himself. As Pannenberg says, in social life, substitution is a
universal phenomenon. . . . Even the structure of vocation, the di-
vision of labour, has substitutionary character. One who has a vo-
cation performs this function for those whom he serves. For every
service has vicarious character by recognizing a need in the per-
son served that apart from the service that person would have to
satisfy for himself.15 In this broad sense, nobody who wishes to
say with Paul that there is a true sense in which Christ died for
us (huper, on our behalf, for our benefit), and Christ redeemed us
15Wolfhart Pannenberg,JesusGod and Man,tr. Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A.
Priebe, SCM, London (1968) 268, 259.
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from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (huperagain) (Rom. 5:8; Gal. 3:13), and who accepts Christs assurance
that he came to give his life a ransom for many (anti, which
means precisely in place of, in exchange for16), should hesitate
to say that Christs death was substitutionary. Indeed, if he de-
scribes Christs death as vicarious he is actually saying it.
It is, of course, no secret why people shy off this word. It is
because they equate, and know that others equate, substitution in
Christology with penal substitution. This explains the state of af-
fairs which, writing in 1948, F. W. Camfield described as follows:
If there is one conclusion which (has) come almost to be taken
for granted in enlightened Christian quarters, it is that the idea of
substitution has led theology on a wrong track; and that the word
substitution must now be dropped from the doctrine of the
Atonement as too heavily laden with misleading and even false
connotations. By liberal or modernist theology the idea of subs-
titution is of course rejected out of hand. And even the theology
which prides itself on being positive and evangelical andwhich seeks to maintain lines of communication with the great
traditional doctrines of atonement is on the whole disposed to re-
ject it. And this, not merely on the ground that it holds implica-
tions which are irrational and morally offensive, but even and
specifically on the ground that it is unscriptural. Thus Dr Vincent
Taylor as a result of exhaustive examination of the Idea of
Atonement in the New Testament gives it as his conclusion that
the idea of substitution has no place in the New Testament writ-
16See R. E. Davies, Christ in our Placethe contribution of the Prepositions,
Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970) 72ff.
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ings; that in fact it is opposed to the fundamental teaching of theNew Testament; that even St Paul though he sometimes trembles
on the edge of substitutionary conceptions nevertheless avoids
them. It is difficult to escape the impression that Dr. Vincent Tay-
lors anxiety to eliminate the idea of substitution from evangelical
theology has coloured his interpretation of the New Testament
witness. But his conclusions provide a striking indication of the
tendency at work in modern evangelical circles. It is felt that noth-
ing has done more to bring the evangelical doctrine of the Atone-
ment into disrepute than the idea of substitution; and therefore,
something like a sigh of relief makes itself heard when it is sug-
gested that this idea rests on a misunderstanding of the teaching
of Scripture.17
Today, more than a quarter of a century later, the picture
Camfield draws would have to be qualified by reference to the
17F. W. Camfield, The Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonement,
SJT I (1948) 282f., referring to Vincent Taylor, The Atonement in New Testament
Teaching. Taylor, while allowing that Paul in particular, is within a hairs breadth of
substitutions (p. 288), and that a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress
guarded by such ordnance as Mark x. 45, Romans vi. 10f., 2 Corinthians v. 14, 21,
Galatians iii. 13, and 1 Timothy ii. 5f., is more difficult to dislodge than many New
Testament students imagine (p. 289), rejects substitution as implying a redemption
wrought entirely outside of, and apart from, ourselves so that we have not hing to
do but to accept its benefits (p. 125).He describes Christs death as a representa-
tive sacrifice, involving endurance of sins penalty plus that archetypal expression of
penitence for humanitys wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod
Campbell and R. C. Moberly. We participate in this sacrifice, Taylor continues, by
offering it on our own behalf, which we do by letting it teach us to repent. Taylor
admits that from his standpoint there is a gap in Pauline teaching. With clear eyes
St Paul marks the one act of righteousness in the obedience of Christ (Romans v.18f.) and the fact that He was made to be sin on our behalf (2 Cori nthians v. 21),
but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the
presence of His Father (p. 291).
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vigorous vindication and use of the substitution idea by such asPannenberg and Barth;18 nonetheless, in British theology the over-
all situation remains very much as Camfield describes. It would,
however, clarify discussion if all who hold that Jesus by dying did
something for us which we needed to do but could not, would
agree that they are regarding Christs death as substitutionary,
and differing only on the nature of the action which Jesus per-
formed in our place and also, perhaps, on the way we enter into
the benefit that flows from it. Camfield himself goes on to spell
out a non-penal view of substitution.
Broadly speaking, there have been three ways in which Chr-
ists death has been explained in the church. Each reflects a pa r-
ticular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin, and of
what is needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance
on his side and faith and love on ours. It is worth glancing at them
to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each.
There is first, the type of account which sees the cross as hav-
ing its effect entirely on men, whether by revealing Gods love tous, or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins, or by
setting us a supreme example of godliness, or by blazing a trail to
God which we may now follow, or by so involving mankind in his
redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us, or by
all these modes together. It is assumed that our basic need is lack
of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine
life; all that is needed to set us in a right relationship with God is a
change in us at these two points, and this Christs death brings
18See Pannenberg, op. cit., pp. 258-269; Barth, Church Dogmatics IV. I, tr. G. W.
Bromiley, T. and T. Clark, Edinburgh (1956), viif., 230ff., 550ff.
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about. The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem; assoon as we are changed we become forgivable, and are then forgi-
ven at once. This view has little or no room for any thought of
substitution, since it goes so far in equating what Christ did forus
with what he does to us.
A second type of account sees Christs death as having its ef-
fect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are
held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate
moral twistedness is one sign and symptom. The cross is seen as
the work of God going forth to battle as our champion, just as Da-
vid went forth as Israels champion to fight Goliath. Through the
cross these hostile forces, however conceived whether as sin
and death, Satan and his hosts, the demonic in society and its
structures, the powers of Gods wrath and curse, or anything else
are overcome and nullified, so that Christians are not in bon-
dage to them, but share Christs triumph over them. The assump-
tion here is that mans plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic
forces distinct from God; yet, seeing Jesus as our champion, expo-
nents of this view could still properly call him our substitute, just
as all the Israelites who declined Goliaths challenge in 1 Samuel
17:8-11 could properly call David their substitute. Just as a substi-
tute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if
they had done it themselves is their representative, so a represent-
ative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is
their substitute. What this type of account of the cross affirms
(though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering
Christ, whose victory secured our release, was our representative
substitute.
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The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the othertwo views save their assumption that they are complete. There is
biblical support for all they say, but it goes further. It grounds
mans plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that , for all
Gods daily goodness to him, as a sinner he stands under divine
judgment, and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence, and
unless Gods rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost
for ever. On this view, Christs death had its effect first on God,
who was hereby propitiated (or, better, who hereby propitiated
himself), and only because it had this effect did it become an
overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of Gods
seeking and saving love. The thought here is that by dying Christ
offered to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins, satis-
faction which Gods own character dictated as the only means
whereby his no to us could become a yes. Whether this God-
ward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself, or
death as the perfecting of holy obedience, or an undergoing of the
God-forsakenness of hell, which is Gods final judgment on sin, or
a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their
bitterness by sympathetic identification, or all these things togeth-
er (and nothing stops us combining them together), the shape of
this view remains the same that by undergoing the cross Jesus
expiated our sins, propitiated our Maker, turned Gods no to us
into a yes, and so saved us. All forms of this view see Jesus as
our representative substitute in fact, whether or not they call him
that, but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as
penal.
This analysis prompts three comments.
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First, it should be noted that though the two former viewsregularly set themselves in antithesis to the third, the third takes
up into itself all the positive assertions that they make; which rais-
es the question whether any more is at issue here than the impro-
priety of treating half-truth as the whole truth, and of rejecting a
more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations
about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins.
Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstand-
ing and distorting themselves in this way, the much-disputed
claim that a broadly substitutionary view of the cross has always
been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have sub-
stance in it after all. It is a pity that books on the atonement so of-
ten take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have ap-
peared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically
exclusive. This is always arbitrary, and sometimes quite perverse.
Second, it should be noted that our analysis was simply of
views about the death of Christ, so nothing was said about his re-
surrection. All three types of view usually agree in affirming that
the resurrection is an integral part of the gospel; that the gospel
proclaims a living, vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the
firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern
for ours is not a matter of dispute between them. It is sometimes
pointed out that the second view represents the resurrection of
Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of
death, whereas the third view does not, and hardly could,
represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or
the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of
Calvary is conceived); and on this basis the third view is some-
times criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary. But this
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criticism may be met in two ways. The first reply is that Christssaving work has two parts, his dealing with his Father on our be-
half by offering himself in substitutionary satisfaction for our sins
and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us
through faith the forgiveness which his death secured, and it is as
important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them to-
gether. For a demonstration that part two is now possible because
part one is finished, and for the actual implementing of part two,
Jesus resurrection is indeed essential, and so appears as an organ-
ic element in his work as a whole. The second reply is that these
two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized,
following the example of Paul in Colossians 2:13-15, as being
complementary models expressing different elements in the single
complex reality which is the mystery of the cross.
Third, it should be noted that not all advocates of the third
type of view have been happy to use the word substitution. This
has been partly, through desire to evade the Socinian criticism
that in the penal realm substitution is impossible, and partly for
fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our substitute obscures
his call to us to die and rise in him and with him, for the moral
transforming of us into his holy image. P.T. Forsyth, for example,
is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his pas-
sion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger
against mans sin;19yet he rejects substitution in favour of repre-
19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered. And the sacr i-
fice He offered was the judgment He accepted. His passive suffering became active
obedience, and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ, Hodder and Stough-ton, London (1910) 163). In a 2,000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Rit-
schlian view, later to be espoused by C. H. Dodd, that the wrath of God is simply
the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor . . . as if there were
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sentation and replaces substitutionary expiation (which, as thesewords are commonly understood, leaves us too little committed)
by solidary reparation, solidary confession and praise, because
he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify
with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity
in him.20But, admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in
Romans 6:1-11, avoiding the word substitution can only have the
effect of obscuring what is in Romans 3:21-28, where Paul de-
scribes Christ as a propitiation21. . . by his blood (verse 25) in vir-
tue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (5:17)
upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (4:5). As
James Denney, said, If Christ died the death in which sin had in-
volved us if in His death He took the responsibility of our sins
on Himself no word is equal to this which falls short of what is
no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin, and no infliction of His
displeasure upon the sinner (p. 239). He argues to the position that what Ch rist
bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the imper-
sonal consequences of sin, but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis--
vis of an angry God. God never left him, but He did refuse Him His face. The
communion was not broken, but its light was withdrawn (p. 243).20Op. cit., pp. 164,182, 223,225f. Substitution does not take account of the
moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p. 182, note).21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is re-
placed by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and
other modern versions. The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its
means; thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was
previously absent, but tocut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was
previously thought to be present. The case for expiation was put forward by C. H.
Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support, but a generation of debate has
shown that the linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiation (Matthew Black,Romans,New Century Bible, Oliphants, London (1973) 68). See the full coverage of
literature cited by Black, and also David Hill, Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings
Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48.
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meant by calling Him our substitute.22The correct reply to For-syth would seem to be that before Christs death can be represent-
ative, in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and
praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing,
it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods
wrath against our sins; otherwise, our confession and praise in
solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that wrath
in other words, a meritorious work, aimed at securing pardon,
assuming that in Christ we save ourselves.
What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by
anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910. A reviewer of The Death
of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of
view, we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ
presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as
an act which the race does in Christ. In The Atonement and the
Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on
them thus:
22Denney, The Death of Christ,2nd ed., including The Atonement and the Modern
Mind,Hodder and Stoughtons, London (1911) 73. Denneys summary of the mean-
ing of Rom. 3:25f. is worth quoting. It is Christ set forth in His blood wh o is a
propitiation; that is, it is Christ who died. In dying, as St Paul conceived it, He
made our sin His own; He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods
sight and to Gods law: He became sin, became a curse for us. It is this which gives
His death a propitiatory character and power; in other words, which makes it poss-
ible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those
who believe in Jesus. . . . I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if
vicariousor substitutionary does not, nor do I know any interpretation of Chr-
ists death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners, if this
vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p. 126). Denneys point in the lastsentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it acco mplished something
which we needed, which we could not do for ourselves, and which Christ could not
do without dying.
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In plain English, Paul teaches less that Christ died for theungodly, than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves. This
brings out the logic of what representative means when repre-
sentative is opposed to substitution.23 The representative is ours,
we are in Him, and we are supposed to get over all the moral dif-
ficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours,
and because we are one with Him. But the fundamental fact of the
situation is that, to begin with, Christ is not ours, and we are not
one with Him. . . . we are without Christ (choris Christou). . . .A
representative not produced by us, but given to us not chosen
by us, but the elect of God is not a representative at all in the
first instance, but a substitute,24
So the true position, on the type of view we are exploring,
may be put thus: We identify with Christ against the practice of
sin because we have already identified him as the one who took
our place under sentence for sin. We enter upon the life of repen-
tance because we have learned that he first endured for us the
death of reparation. The Christ into whom we now accept incor-
poration is the Christ who previously on the cross became our
propitiation not, therefore, one in whom we achieve our recon-
ciliation with God, but one through whom we receive it as free
23It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Den-
ney has in view, whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken
as the model for ones own, representative may (and usually does) signify simply
this: that ones status is such that one involves others, for good or ill, in the conse-
quences of what one does. In this sense, families are represented by fathers, nations
by kings, presidents and government ministers, and humanity by Adam and Christ;
and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute. Cf.pp. 33fbelow.24The Death of Christ,304; cf. 307, Union with Christ (i.e. personal, moral union,
by faith) . . . is not a presupposition of Christs work, it is its fruit.
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gift based on a finished work (cf.Rom. 5:10); and we love him, be-cause he first loved us and gave himself for us. So substitution, on
this view, really is the basic category; the thought of Christ as our
representative, however construed in detail, cannot be made to
mean what substitution means, and our solidarity with Christ in
confession and praise, so far from being a concept alternative to
that of substitution, is actually a response which presupposes it.
IV. PENAL SUBSTITUTION
Now we move to the second stage in our model-building, and
bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have
in view. To add this qualifier, as Ramsey would call it, is to anc-
hor the model of substitution (not exclusively, but regulatively)
within the world of moral law, guilty conscience, and retributive
justice. Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the
thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into fa-
vour not because of any amends we have attempted, but because
the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ. The no-
tion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus
Christ our Lord, moved by a love that was determined to do eve-
rything necessary to save us, endured and exhausted the destruc-
tive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably
destined, and so won us forgiveness, adoption and glory. To af-
firm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ
specifically for this, and that this is the mainspring of all their joy,
peace and praise both now and for eternity.
The general thought is clear enough, but for our present pur-
pose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning, and here a methodo-
logical choice must be made, Should we appeal to particular exist-
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ing accounts of penal substitution, or construct a composite of ourown? At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is, I suppose, the
gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course,
for the following main reasons.
First, there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes
has been, and still sometimes is, asserted in ways which merit the
favourite adjective of its critics crude. As one would expect of
that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring
of evangelical piety popular piety, as Roman Catholics would
call it ways of presenting it have grown up which are devo-
tionally evocative without always being theologically rigorous.
Moreover, the more theological expositions of it since Socinus
have tended to be one-track-minded; constricted in interest by the
preoccupations of controversy, and absorbed in the task of proc-
laiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disre-
garded or denied, upholders of the penal theory have sometimes
so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have
found room for nothing else. Rarely have they in theory denied
the value of other theories, but sometimes they have in practice
ignored them.25 Also, as we have seen, much of the more forma-
tive and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in
the seventeenth century, at a time when Protestant exegesis of
Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecog-
nized natural theology of law, and this has left its mark on many
later statements. All this, being so, it might be hard to find an ac-
count of penal substitution which could safely be taken as stan-
25Leon Morris, The Cross in the New Testament, Paternoster Press, Exeter (1965)
401.
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dard or as fully representative, and it will certainly be morestraight-forward if I venture an analysis of my own.
Second, I have already hinted that I think it important for the
theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting
forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics. One
result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three
centuries, from the Socinians to the Hegelians, was to nourish the
now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in
theology is to resolve how problems within an established frame
of thought about God and man. In other words, theological theo-
ries are like detectives theories in whodunits; they are hypotheses
relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement
is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the
last page no mystery should be felt to remain). Now we have seen
that, for discernible historical reasons, penal substitution has
sometimes been explicated as a theory of this kind, telling us how
divine love and justice could be, and were, reconciled (whatever
that means); but a doubt remains as to whether this way of under-
standing the theme is biblically right. Is the harmonization of
Gods attributes any part of the information, or is it even the kind
of information, that the inspired writers are concerned to give?
Gustaf Auln characterized the Christus victor motif (he would
not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea of the atonement rather
than a rationale of its mechanics, and contrasted it in this respect
with the Latin view, of which penal substitution is one form; 26
but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a
dramatic idea, declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically,
26Christus Victor, 175. etc.
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i.e. as gospel (good news), just as Aulns conquest-motif is con-cerned to do? I believe it should. Surely the primary issue with
which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor
the rationality of Gods ways, but the remission of my sins; and
the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge
of being guilty before God with my knowledge that, on the one
hand, no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now
arise, and, on the other hand, that the risen Christ whom I am
called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus, who secured my
immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty
which was my due. The effect of this correlation is not in any
sense to solve or dissipate the, mystery of the work of God (it is
not that sort of mystery!); the effect is simply to define that work
with precision, and thus to evoke faith, hope, praise and respon-
sive love to Jesus Christ. So, at least, I think, and therefore I wish
my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as
a kergymatic model; and so I think it best to offer my own analyti-
cal definition, which will aim to be both descriptive of what all
who have held this view had had in common, and also prescrip-
tive of how the term should be understood in any future discus-
sion.
Third, if the present examination of penal substitution is to be
worth while it must present this view in its best light, and I think
an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal. The typical
modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that, over
and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism),
they are less than fully personal. Thus, for instance, C.W.H.
Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God in-
flicts retributive punishment, and retribution is impersonal; it
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considers offences in the abstract . . . we ought not to ascribepurely retributive justice to God . . . the Father of mankind does
not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribu-
tion . . . to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of
love. . . . It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of
Atonement that was geared to a conception of punishment which
found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sin-
ners or the substitute who took their place. It is time, too, to stop
the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject
the idea of a God of retribution. 27 Lampes violent language
shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a
sub-personal, non-loving order of relationships, and that penal
substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here.
James Denneys sense of the contrast betweenpersonal rela-
tions, which are moral, and legal relations, which tend to be im-
personal, external and arbitrary, once drew from him an outburst
which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes. Few things
have astonished me more (he wrote) than to be charged with
teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atone-
ment. . . . There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more
whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these
words. To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to
say that they are regulated by statute that sin is a breach of sta-
tute that the sinner is a criminal and that God adjudicates on
him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case. Eve-
27 G. W. H. Lampe, The Atonement: Law and Love, in Soundings, ed. A. R.
Vidler, Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff.
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rybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth.28 It is noticeablethat Denney, the champion of the substitutionary idea, never calls
Christs substitution penal; in his situation, the avoidance must
have been deliberate. Yet Denney affirmed these four truths: first,
that the relations of God and man . . . are personal, but . . . deter-
mined by (moral) law; second, that there is in the nature of
things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect
work is fatal, that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin,
and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture
when it says that the wages of sin is death; third, that the inevit-
able reactions of the divine order against evil... are the sin itself
coming back in another form and finding out the sinner. They are
nothing if not retributive; and, fourth, that while the agony and
the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus
through a bad conscience, or making Him the personal object of
divine wrath, they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour
He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the
race . . . and that without doing so He could not have been the Re-
deemer of that race from sin.29 It seems to me that these affirma-
tions point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution
model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all
28Denney, op. cit., 271f.; from The Atonement and the Modern Mind. Den-
neys last sentence over-states; as J. S. Whale says, the Christian religion has
thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim, but also as Criminal and all
three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and
Victim, Cambridge University Press (1960) 70).29Denney, The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, Hodder and Stoughton, London
(1917) 187, 214, 208, 273. On pp. 262f. and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintellig-
ible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings andthose which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment; to realise to
the full the divine reaction against sin in the race, wha tever it meant, did not mean
that.
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Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept meansto those who embrace it. But the formulation itself will have to be
my own.
So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a
model of the atonement, under five heads: substitution andretri-
bution; substitution and solidarity; substitution and mystery;
substitution and salvation; substitution and divine love. Others
who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurate-
ly or not.
1. Substitution and retribution
Penal substitution, as an idea, presupposes a penalty (poena)
due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet
his claims. The locus classicus on this is Romans 1:183:20, but
the thought is everywhere in the New Testament. The judicial
context is a moral context too; whereas human judicial systems are
not always rooted in moral reality, the Bible treats the worlds of
moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding. Divine judg-
ment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our
present and future existence, and God himself is in charge of this
process, ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of
what we have been is always there to touch and wither wha t we
are and shall be. In the words of Emil Brunner, Guilt means that
our past that which can never be made good always consti-
tutes one element in our present situation.30 When Lady Macbeth,
walking and talking in her sleep, sees blood on her hand, and
cannot clean or sweeten it, she witnesses to the order of retribu-
30Brunner, The Mediator, tr. O. Wyon, Lutterworth Press, London (1934) 443.
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tion as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective men cer-tainly, those who believe in penal substitution have come to
know it: wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time, as David forgot
his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah, but sooner or later it comes
back to mind, as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry, and at
once our attention is absorbed, our peace and pleasure are gone,
and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have
done. When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure, this sense
of things is the start of hell. Now it is into this context of aware-
ness that the model of penal substitution is introduced, to focus
for us four insights about our situation.
Insight one concerns God; it is that the retributive principle
has his sanction, and indeed expresses the holiness, justice and
goodness reflected in his law, and that death, spiritual as well as
physical, the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body, is
the rightful sentence which he has announced against us, and now
prepares to inflict.
Insight two concerns ourselves: it is that, standing thus undersentence, we are helpless either to undo, the past or to shake off
sin in the present, and thus have no way of averting what threat-
ens.
Insight three concerns Jesus Christ: it is that he, the God-man
of John 1:1-18 and Hebrews 1-2, took our place under judgment
and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of
the death that was our sentence, whatever these were, so laying
the foundation for our pardon and immunity.
We may not know, we cannot tell
What pains he had to bear;
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But we believe it was for usHe hung and suffered there.
Insight four concerns faith: it is that faith is a matter first and
foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and
his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future
hope. Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were, and
that Gods law of retribution, which our conscience declares to be
right, has not ceased to operate in his world, nor ever will; but
that in our case the law has operated already, so that all our sins,
past present and even future, have been covered by Calvary. So
our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have
already been judged and punished, however strange the state-
ment may sound, in the person and death of another. Bunyans
pilgrim before the cross loses his burden, and Toplady can assure
himself that:
If thou my pardon hast secured,
And freely in my room endured
The whole of wrath divine,Payment God cannot twice demand,
First from my bleeding suretys hand
And then again from mine.
Reasoning thus, faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of
righteousness, i.e. the rightness with God thatthe righteous enjoy
(cf. Rom. 5:16f.), and with it the justified mans obligation to live
henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again ( cf.
2 Cor. 5:14).
This analysis, if correct, shows what job the word penal does
in our model. It is there, not to prompt theoretical puzzlement
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about the transferring of guilt, but to articulate the insight of be-lievers who, as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Tes-
tament, are constrained to say, Jesus was bearing the judgment I
deserved (and deserve), the penalty for my sins, the punishment
due to me he loved me, and gave himself for me (Gal. 2:20).
How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not
claim to know, any more than they know how it was possible for
him to be made man; but that he bore it is the certainty on which
all their hopes rest.
2. Substitution and solidarity
Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transferable
and the substitution described, if real, would be immoral, our
model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as
the second man and last Adam, who involved us in his sin-
bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf. 1 Cor.
15:45ff.; Rom. 5:12 ff.). Penal substitution was seen by Luther, the
pioneer in stating it, and by those who came after as grounded in
this ontological solidarity, and as being one moment in the larger
mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr
31Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here. The first is from his exposition
of Psalm 21 (22): This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners:
wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs: and the righ-
teousness of Christ not Christs but ours. He has emptied himself of his righteous-
ness that he might clothe us with it, and fill us with it: and he has taken our evils
upon himself that he might deliver us from them . . . in the same manner as he
grieved and suffered in our sins, and was confounded, in the same manner we re-
joice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar, 1883) 5.608). The second is
from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein: Learn Christ and him crucified. Learn topray to him and, despairing of yourself, say: Thou, Lord Jesus, art my righteous-
ness, but I am thy sin. Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to
me what is thine. Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given
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Morna Hooker designates interchange in Christ.32In this mysterythere are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incar-
nation when the Son of God came into the human situation, born
of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem them
which were under the law (Gal. 4:4f.). The second moment was
the cross, where Jesus, as Luther and Calvin put it, carried our
identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dying as Paul
to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel, ed. Theodore C. Tappert (Library
of Christian Classics) SCM Press, London (1955) 110.32Article inJTS22 (1971) 349-361.33Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly, as was always his way. All the
prophets did foresee in spirit, that Christ should become the greatest transgressor,
murderer, adulterer, thief, rebel, blasphemer, etc., that ever was . . . for he being
made a sacrifice, for the sins of the whole world, is not now an innocent person
and without sins . . . our most merciful Father . . . sent his only Son into the world
and laid upon him the sins of all men, saying: Be thou Peter that denier; Paul that
persecutor, blasphemer and cruel oppressor; David that adulterer; that sinner which
did eat the apple in Paradise; that thief which hanged upon the cross; and, briefly,
be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men; see therefore that
thou pay and satisfy for them. Here now cometh the law and saith: I find him a
sinner . . . therefore let him die upon the cross . . . (Galatians,ed. Philip S. Watson,
James Clarke, London (1953) 269-271; on Gal. 3:13). Auln (Christus Victor,chapter
VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross
and resurrection, but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Chr-
ists victorious work is basically defined. The essence of Christs victory, according
to Luther, is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so
freeing us from Satins power by overcoming Gods curse; if Luthers whole trea t-
ment of Gal. 3: